Bike Messengers

The Rise of the Paris Bike Messenger

After years of trying, bicycle messengers in the French capital are making ground.

james startt

(Photo by Many full-time bike messengers in Paris are guaranteed a fixed salary with full benefits and meals. And the best, such as Clement Gayraud, pictured above, can earn nearly 2,000 euros in a good month. (Photo by James Startt))

To some observers, the growth of cycling in Paris over the past several years has come as something of a surprise, yet the bike messenger a la française is a sure sign that the City of Light is, slowly but surely, becoming a city of bikes.

For a long time, French politics actually favored automobile traffic, which made pedaling around the city a relentless struggle. Such attitudes, thankfully, slowly started changing in the 1990s with the introduction of bike lanes, and the metamorphosis continued with the highly popular Vélib’ bike-share program, which began in 2006.

Today, there are more bike messengers in Paris than ever before, according to the biggest delivery services. The movement actually began with a false start, in 1996, when New York’s well-known Breakaway Courier Systems opened a Paris office. But the start-up struggled to gain ground and closed within two years.

Andrew Young, general manager of Breakaway in Manhattan, employs 100 messengers, most of whom work part-time. Young says that unlike cities such as Hong Kong and New York, many urban capitals really don’t have the density needed for a bike-messenger service to thrive and are just too spread out. Indeed, in Paris there’s no concentrated business district as in, say, Manhattan.

As a result, many messengers in Paris struggle to remain competitive against the long-established scooter-driven delivery systems. Average deliveries, or “runs,” are longer in Paris than in New York City—too long for a cyclist to sprint from one pickup to another. Dan Chabanov, who’s pedaled thousands of miles as a messenger in New York, says he could do 15 to 25 runs on any given day, and may ride 40 miles during an average shift. But a messenger in Paris would likely have to cover twice that distance to complete the same number of runs.

Though Breakaway’s foray into Paris didn’t last, the office eventually morphed into Urban Cycle in 2000. While the new messenger service struggled early on, today it commands a solid share of the delivery-services market, the company says.

“When Breakaway started, we had six messengers, but today we have 25,” says Patrick Boudard, who worked at Breakaway before founding Urban Cycle. He says it’s one of the few delivery services in Paris that relies 100 percent on bike messengers. That said, just about every delivery service in the city now has at least some bike messengers, too.

The break room at Urban Velo, a delivery service in Paris. (Photo by James Startt)

“There was never a real boom,” says Boudard. “It’s just slowly taken hold, slowly entered into the minds of French businesses.” He says that greater attention to environmental issues is one factor for the bike messenger’s rise, but adds that cyclists themselves make the best argument.